The Girl Next Door Read online

  She was halfway across the stones by the time I thought to ask her.

  “Hey! Back where? Where are you going?”

  She smiled. “We’re staying with the Chandlers. Susan and I. Susan’s my sister.”

  Then I stood too, like somebody had jerked me to my feet on invisible strings.

  “The Chandlers? Ruth? Donny and Willie’s mom?”

  She finished crossing and turned and stared at me. And something in her face was different now all of a sudden. Cautious.

  It stopped me.

  “That’s right. We’re cousins. Second cousins. I’m Ruth’s niece I guess.”

  Her voice had gone odd on me too. It sounded flat—like there was something I wasn’t supposed to know. Like she was telling me something and hiding it at the same time.

  It confused me for a moment. I had the feeling that maybe it confused her too.

  It was the first I’d seen her flustered. Even including the stuff about the scar.

  I didn’t let it bother me though.

  Because the Chandlers’ house was right next door to my house.

  And Ruth was … well, Ruth was great. Even if her kids were jerks sometimes. Ruth was great.

  “Hey!” I said. “We’re neighbors! Mine’s the brown house next door!”

  I watched her climb the embankment. When she got to the top she turned and her smile was back again, the clean open look she’d had when she first sat down beside me on the Rock.

  She waved. “See you, David.”

  “See you, Meg.”

  Neat, I thought. Incredible. I’ll be seeing her all the time.

  It was the first such thought I’d ever had.

  I realize that now.

  That day, on that Rock, I met my adolescence head-on in the person of Megan Loughlin, a stranger two years older than I was, with a sister, a secret, and long red hair. That it seemed so natural to me, that I emerged unshaken and even happy about the experience I think said much for my future possibilities—and of course for hers.

  When I think of that, I hate Ruth Chandler.

  Ruth, you were beautiful then.

  I’ve thought about you a lot—no, I’ve researched you, I’ve gone that far, dug into your past, parked across the street one day from that Howard Avenue office building you were always telling us about, where you ran the whole damn show while the Boys were away fighting The Big One, the War to End All Wars Part Two—that place where you were utterly, absolutely indispensable until the “little GI pukes came struning back home again,” as you put it, and sud denly you were out of a job. I parked there and it looked ordinary, Ruth. It looked squalid and sad and boring.

  I drove to Morristown where you were born and that was nothing too. Of course I didn’t know where your house was supposed to be but I certainly couldn’t see your grand disappointed dreams being born there either, in that town, I couldn’t see the riches your parents supposedly thrust upon you, showered you with, I couldn’t see your wild frustration.

  I sat in your husband Willie Sr.’s bar—Yes!—I found him, Ruth! In Fort Myers, Florida, where he’d been ever since he left you with your three squalling brats and a mortgage all these thirty years ago, I found him playing barkeep to the senior citizens, a mild man, amiable, long past his prime—I sat there and looked at his face and into his eyes and we talked and I couldn’t see the man you always said he was, the stud, the “lovely Irish bastard, ” that mean sonovabitch. He looked like a man gone soft and old to me. A drinkers nose, a drinkers gut, a fat fallen ass in a pair of baggy britches. And he looked like he’d never been hard, Ruth. Never. That was the surprise, really.

  Like the hardness was elsewhere.

  So what was it, Ruth? All lies? All your awn inventions?

  I wouldn’t put it past you.

  Or maybe it was that for you—funneled through you—lies and truth were the same.

  I’m going to try to change that now if I can. I’m going to tell our little story. Straight as I can from here on in and no interruptions.

  And I’m writing this for you, Ruth. Because I never got to pay you back, really.

  So here my check. Overdue and overdrawn.

  Cash it in hell.

  Chapter Three

  Early the following morning I walked next door.

  I remember feeling shy about it, a little awkward, and that was pretty unusual because nothing could have been more natural than to see what was going on over there.

  It was morning. It was summer. And that was what you did. You got up, ate breakfast and then you went outside and looked around to see who was where.

  The Chandler house was the usual place to start.

  Laurel Avenue was a dead end street back then—it isn’t anymore—a single shallow cut into the half-circle of woodland that bordered the south side of West Maple and ran back for maybe a mile behind it. When the road was first cut during the early 1800s, the woods were so thick with tall first-growth timber they called it Dark Lane. That timber was all gone by now but it was still a quiet, pretty street. Shade trees everywhere, each house different from the one beside it and not too close together like some you saw.

  There were still only thirteen homes on the block. Ruth’s, ours, five others going up the hill on our side of the street and six on the opposite.

  Every family but the Zorns had kids. And every kid knew every other kid like he knew his own brother. So if you wanted company you could always find some back by the brook or the crabapple grove or up in somebody’s yard—whoever had the biggest plastic pool that year or the target for bow and arrow.

  If you wanted to get lost that was easy too. The woods were deep.

  The Dead End Kids, we called ourselves.

  It had always been a closed circle.

  We had our own set of rules, our own mysteries, our own secrets. We had a pecking order and we applied it with a vengeance. We were used to it that way.

  But now there was somebody new on the block. Somebody new over at Ruth’s place.

  It felt funny.

  Especially because it was that somebody.

  Especially because it was that place.

  It felt pretty damn funny indeed.

  Ralphie was squatting out by the rock garden. It was maybe eight o’clock and already he was dirty. There were streaks of sweat and grime all over his face and arms and legs like he’d been running all morning and falling down thwack in deep clouds of dust. Falling frequently. Which he probably had, , knowing Ralphie. Ralphie was ten years old and I don’t think I’d ever seen him clean for more than fifteen minutes in my life. His shorts and T-shirt were crusty too.

  “Hey, Woofer.”

  Except for Ruth, nobody called him Ralphie—always Woofer. When he wanted to he could sound more like the Robertsons’ basset hound Mitsy than Mitsy could.

  “Hiya, Dave.”

  He was turning over rocks, watching potato bugs and thousand-leggers scurry away from the light. But I could see he wasn’t interested in them. He kept moving one rock after the other. Turning them over, dropping them down again. He had a Libby’s lima beans can beside him and he kept on shifting that too, keeping it close beside his scabby knees as he went from rock to rock.

  “What’s in the can?”

  “Nightcrawlers,” he said. He still hadn’t looked at me. He was concentrating, frowning, moving with that jerky nervous energy that was patented Woofer. Like he was a scientist in a lab on the brink of some incredible fantastic discovery and he wished you’d just leave him the hell alone to get on with it.

  He flipped another rock.

  “Donny around?”

  “Yep.” He nodded.

  Which meant that Donny was inside. And since I felt kind of nervous about going inside I stayed with him awhile. He upended a big one. And apparently found what he was after.

  Red ants. A swarm of them down there beneath the rock—hundreds, thousands of them. All going crazy with the sudden light.

  I’ve never been fond of ant
s. We used to put up pots of water to boil and then pour it on them whenever they decided it would be nice to climb the front porch steps over at our place—which for some reason they did about once every summer. It was my dad’s idea, but I endorsed it entirely. I thought boiling water was just about what ants deserved.

  I could smell their iodine smell along with wet earth and wet cut grass.

  Woofer pushed the rock away and then reached into the Libby’s can. He dug out a nightcrawler and then a second one and dumped them in with the ants.

  He did this from a distance of about three feet. Like he was bombing the ants with worm meat.

  The ants responded. The worms began rolling and bucking as the ants discovered their soft pink flesh.

  “Sick, Woofer,” I said. “That’s really sick.”

  “I found some black ones over there,” he said. He pointed to a rock on the opposite side of the porch. “You know, the big ones. Gonna collect ‘em and put ’em in with these guys here. Start an ant war. You want to bet who wins?”

  “The red ants will win,” I said. “The red ants always win.”

  It was true. The red ants were ferocious. And this game was not new to me.

  “I got another idea,” I said. “Why don’t you stick your hand in there? Pretend you’re Son of Kong or something.”

  He looked at me. I could tell he was considering it. Then he smiled.

  “Naw,” he said. “That’s retarded.”

  I got up. The worms were still squirming.

  “See you, Woof,” I said.

  I climbed the stairs to the porch. I knocked on the screen door and went inside.

  Donny was sprawled on the couch wearing nothing but a pair of wrinkled white slept-in boxer shorts. He was only three months older than I was but much bigger in the chest and shoulders and now, recently, he was developing a pretty good belly, following in the footsteps of his brother, Willie Jr. It was not a beautiful thing to see and I wondered where Meg was now.

  He looked up at me from a copy of Plastic Man. Personally I’d pretty much quit the comics since the Comic Code came in in ’54 and you couldn’t get Web of Mystery anymore.

  “How you doin’, Dave?”

  Ruth had been ironing. The board was leaning up in a corner and you could smell that sharp musky tang of clean, superheated fabric.

  I looked around.

  “Pretty good. Where’s everybody?”

  He shrugged. “Went shopping.”

  “Willie went shopping? You’re kidding.”

  He closed the comic and got up, smiling, scratching his armpit.

  “Naw. Willie’s got a nine-o’clock appointment with the dentist. Willie’s got cavities. Ain’t it a killer?”

  Donny and Willie Jr. had been born an hour and a half apart but for some reason Willie Jr. had very soft teeth and Donny didn’t. He was always at the dentist.

  We laughed.

  “I hear you met her.”

  “Who?”

  Donny looked at me. I guess I wasn’t fooling anybody.

  “Oh, your cousin. Yeah. Down by the Rock yesterday. She caught a crayfish first try.”

  Donny nodded. “She’s good at stuff,” he said.

  It wasn’t exactly enthusiastic praise, but for Donny—and especially for Donny talking about a girl—it was pretty respectful.

  “C’mon,” he said. “Wait here while I get dressed and we’ll go see what Eddie’s doing.”

  I groaned.

  Of all the kids on Laurel Avenue Eddie was the one I tried to stay away from. Eddie was crazy.

  I remember Eddie walking down the street once in the middle of a stickball game we were playing stripped to the waist with a big live black snake stuck between his teeth. Nature Boy. He threw it at Woofer, who screamed, and then at Billy Borkman. In fact he kept picking it up and throwing it at all the little kids and chasing them waving the snake until the concussion of hitting the road so many times sort of got to the snake eventually and it wasn’t much fun anymore.

  Eddie got you in trouble.

  Eddie’s idea of a great time was to do something dangerous or illegal, preferably both—walk the crossbeams of a house under construction or pelt crabapples at cars from Canoe Brook Bridge—and maybe get away with it. If you got caught or hurt that was okay, that was funny. If he got caught or hurt it was still funny.

  Linda and Betty Martin swore they saw him bite off the head of a frog once. Nobody doubted it.

  His house was at the top of the street on the opposite side from us, and Tony and Lou Morino, who lived next door, said they heard his father beating up on him all the time. Practically every night. His mother and sister got it too. I remember his mother, a big gentle woman with rough thick peasant hands, crying over coffee in the kitchen with my mom, her right eye a great big puffy shiner.

  My dad said Mr. Crocker was nice enough sober but a mean drunk. I didn’t know about that but Eddie had inherited his father’s temper and you never knew when it would go off on you. When it did, he was as likely to pick up a stick or a rock as use his hands. We all bore the scars somewhere. I’d been on the receiving end more than once. Now I tried to stay away.

  Donny and Willie liked him though. Life with Eddie was exciting, you had to give him that much. Though even they knew Eddie was crazy.

  Around Eddie they got crazy too.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll walk you up. But I’m not gonna hang around up there.”

  “Ahh, come on.”

  “I’ve got other stuff to do.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Just stuff.”

  “What’re you gonna do, go home and listen to your mother’s Perry Como records?”

  I gave him a look. He knew he was out of line.

  We were all Elvis fans.

  He laughed.

  “Suit yourself, sport. Just wait up a minute. I’ll be right there.”

  He went down the hall to his bedroom and it occurred to me to wonder how they were working that now that Meg and Susan were there, just who was sleeping where. I walked over to the couch and picked up his Plastic Man. I flipped the pages and put it down again. Then I wandered from the living room to the dining area where Ruth’s clean laundry lay folded on the table and finally into the kitchen. I opened the Frigidaire. As usual there was food for sixty.

  I called to Donny. “Okay to have a Coke?”

  “Sure. And open one for me, will ya?”

  I took out the Cokes, pulled open the right-hand drawer and got the bottle opener. Inside the silverware was stacked all neat and tidy. It always struck me as weird how Ruth had all this food all the time yet had service only for five—five spoons, five forks, five knives, five steak knives, and no soup spoons at all. Of course except for us Ruth never had any company that I knew of. But now there were six people living there. I wondered if she’d finally have to break down and buy some more.

  I opened the bottles. Donny came out and I handed him one. He was wearing jeans and Keds and a T-shirt. The T-shirt was tight over his belly. I gave it a little pat there.

  “Better watch it, Donald,” I said.

  “Better watch it yourself, homo.”

  “Oh, that’s right, I’m a homo, right?”

  “You’re a retard is what you are.”

  “I’m a retard? You’re a skank.”

  “Skank? Girls are skanks. Girls and homos are skanks. You’re the skank. I’m the Duke of Earl.” He punctuated it with a punch to the arm which I returned, and we jostled a little.

  Donny and I were as close to best friends as boys got in those days.

  We went out through the back door into the yard, then around the driveway to the front, and started up to Eddie’s. It was a matter of honor to ignore the sidewalk. We walked in the middle of the street. We sipped our Cokes. There was never any traffic anyway.

  “Your brother’s maiming worms in the rock garden,” I told him.

  He glanced back over his shoulder. “Cute little fella, ain’t
he,”

  “So how do you like it?” I asked him.

  “Like what?”

  “Having Meg and her sister around?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. They just got here.” He took a swig of Coke, belched, and smiled.

  “That Meg’s pretty cute, though, ain’t she? Shit! My cousin!”

  I didn’t want to comment, though I agreed with him.

  “Second cousin, though, you know? Makes a difference. Blood or something. I dunno. Before, we never saw ’em.”

  “Never?”

  “My mom says once. I was too young to remember.”

  “What’s her sister like?”

  “Susan? Like nothing. Just a little kid. What is she, eleven or something?”

  “Woofer’s only ten.”

  “Yeah, right. And what’s Woofer?”

  You couldn’t argue there.

  “Got messed up bad in that accident, though.”

  “Susan?”

  He nodded and pointed to my waist. “Yeah. Broke everything from there on down, my mom says. Every bone you got. Hips, legs, everything.”

  “Jeez.”

  “She still don’t walk too good. She’s all casted up. Got those—what do you call ‘em?—metal things, sticks, that strap on to your arms and you grab ’em, haul yourself along. Kids with polio wear ’em. I forget what they’re called. Like crutches.”

  “Jeez. Is she going to walk again?”

  “She walks.”

  “I mean like regular.”

  “I dunno.”

  We finished our Cokes. We were almost at the top of the hill. It was almost time for me to leave him there. That or suffer Eddie.

  “They both died, y’know,” he said.

  Just like that.

  I knew who he meant, of course, but for a moment I just couldn’t get my mind to wrap around it. Not right away. It was much too weird a concept.

  Parents didn’t just die. Not on my street. And certainly not in car accidents. That kind of thing happened elsewhere, in places more dangerous than Laurel Avenue. They happened in movies or in books. You heard about it on Walter Cronkite.

  Laurel Avenue was a dead end street. You walked down the middle of it.